Ladies, would you entertain or love someone who could not make you laugh? And just to make it blatant, it is yours truly who is singularly lacking in a sense of humour. I simply cannot tell a joke.
The ability to tell a joke is not the same as either being amusing or having a sense of humour.
If I tell a joke you are practically guaranteed I will fluff the punch line, or ruin it some other way. But I like to think I’m a witty conversationalist. 
Hmm…
It isn’t just jokes that make me laugh. However, I do like people who have a sense of humor. Can you laugh at yourself? It’s important to me that a guy be witty. I’ve just never really been attracted to a guy who DOESN’T have a sense of humor.
As long as you laugh at my lame jokes, we would be fine. 
I do not think my mother has ever nailed a joke in her entire life… not one… not ever. She flubs setups, she destroys punchlines, her deliveries are often off, there are times that so many things went wrong with the joke that you have no idea what it even should have been nor why it might have been funny.
Nonetheless, I’ve seen her laugh until she can’t speak while tears are streaming down her face. She can appreciate other people’s jokes and the absurdity of life (and point it out), she’s got wit (not joke telling ability, but wit - for many people they go together, she is not one of those people), and she’s infectious - other people get caught up in her laughter.
She has a sense of humor.
Someone who can’t tell a joke is fine. Someone entirely without humor, who has no appreciation for the funny things of the world, someone who doesn’t laugh - humorless guy is not.
My father’s sense of humor consists solely of telling jokes. He can tell a joke he heard at the bar and laugh at jokes he hears but other than that the guy never smiles or laughs or sees anything funny in anything. My mother never tells jokes but she laughs or makes funny comments all the time. When I was a kid all my friends would say “your mom is so funny.” I’ve never heard her tell a joke.
I think mostly when I say I like someone with a sense of humor I’m talking about someone who laughs and appreciates humor. Not necessarily that they make me laugh. There are plenty of things to make me laugh but it is not nice to be with someone who never thinks those things are funny. It makes you feel like an idiot to be laughing about someone and look at your partner and he’s just sitting there thinking “what’s so funny about that” all the time. Also, “good sense of humor” means lighthearted as opposed to people with a mean sense of humor who only laugh when they’re putting someone down or who make mean jokes.
It goes both ways, men or women.
“Did you hear on the news about this really stupid terrorist?”
“No, what happened?”
“They sent him out to blow up a bus, and he burned his lips on the exhaust pipe.”
My ex-wife’s dead serious reply upon hearing this silly joke;
“Serves him right.”
Now that’s an utter lack of humor, but she loved slapstick. She adored Three stooges and Lucille Ball.
Well, as other people have pointed out, joke-telling =! sense of humor, so that’s not an automatic dealbreaker. Talking about being single as if it were a fate worse than death (doomed? melodramatic much?), however, would make me a bit cranky if I were a single person.
Don’t worry about not being able to tell a joke.
My ex thought he was a very funny man, always making up stupid schoolboy jokes and puns. I didn’t find them or him funny in the least. I guess we all have a different idea of what we consider to be funny or humorous and you just have to find someone who thinks the same way you do.
I prefer a dry sense of humour and clever wit delivered at an appropriate time.
.
Right as rain, CCL. I’ve been truly single for many years now, and about the only thing I really don’t like about it is that I have to do everything myself.
I’d put the ability to have a real conversation a notch or two above a sense of humor in importance in a relationship for me. But I wouldn’t want a complete absence of either, either. 
You know, I would be completely okay with a guy that couldn’t tell jokes…so long as he laughed at mine.
I hate humorless people. I really do.
Its not about how well you tell a joke, its about how attentive you are to events around you and recognizing their absurdity in some way. A lack of interest in the things around you kind of pegs you as narrowminded IMHO. I used to work with one guy who flat-out said “I’m humorless. You wont find me making a joke or smiling, so I thought I’d let you know that” needless to say, while I appreciated his honesty, I ended up disliking him. Its just depressing that people have no curiosity / wonderment in their personalities. Thats not living.
I can’t tell jokes to save my life, and I’m DAMN funny. To tell you the truth, it wouldn’t bother me if I never heard another joke. What makes me laugh, and is an integral part of my attraction to someone else (friend or lover) is their ability to find life intrinsically amusing, and to be able to find the humor in any situation, however bleak.
I can see the good in anyone who can laugh at themselves, however lacking they may appear in other ways, and I’ll give anyone the benefit of the doubt if they can make me laugh.
Wit is a refinement I demand from those I love (and I include the acknowledgement of my own finely-honed wit in my assessment of other people’s wittiness).
Let’s not confuse silliness with humor and wit. Anyone who’s ever lived with a giggle-box can tell you that while being around such a person can be fun, constant exposure can also be trying.